OK, work with us here ... we going to go through a pretty simple,
potentially meaningless, example of how to use the CLT utilities
separately or together. We assume that you have installed SOD and
have the CLT commands somewhere in your search path. If this
assumption is true, you can sing along with these examples. If not,
consider humming. Or, better yet, follow the instructions on the install page to get SOD setup.

Now, let's say you'd like to find all Mb=6.2 and above earthquakes in
2006 within a 10 degree box of the M8-ish Kuril Island
event on 13 Jan 2007. The find_events command would be:

This takes about 32 seconds to execute on a Mac laptop. Not a
screamer, but try to get the same info faster elsewhere and it does
directly access the IRIS DMC database by default.

Now, many of you will realize that station MAJO is in that part of
the world. Those of you who do not know this could use find_stations
to discover as much. But, for brevity, lets say you just know it is
there, not where it is or if it was operating during the time range
of interest. Just type:

The output in this case is not particularly useful, but it does let
you know that MAJO was operating during the time range of interest
because a location is returned. Notice the little "-r" that was
added to the find_events command. That just says pipe this request
to the next command. Think of it like that annoying -K in GMT!
[ASIDE: In reality, what -r does is generate a SOD XML recipe file
instead of actually running the command. Using it without piping to
another CLT utility is a good way to ease yourself into learning SOD
XML recipes.] Also, notice the "-o none" that was added to
find_events as well. That just says there is no need to print out
the events anymore. Use it when you are satisfied with your request
and want to just use it or pipe it elsewhere. OK, a minute or so is
required for this. Again, nothing to write home about, but you know
a lot more than you did and it beats your other options.

Note, we added "-n IU -o none -r" to find_stations and piped the output to
find_seismograms, which gets 'BH*' data for all
these events at station MAJO. That's it! When the smoke clears, you
will have a subdirectory called "seismograms" that in turn has one
directory per event and SAC seismograms for that event at MAJO. By adding "-n IU" to
find_stations you tell SOD to restrict its station search to the IU network which greatly speeds up its work.
The smoke takes less than 3 minutes to clear and in that time, you have
directly accessed the IRIS DMC data archive and delivered seismograms
to your machine, ready for analysis. All from a single command line
sequence! Cool, eh?